The Monday After: 'Extra!' Reliving paper route memories

In a sense, Canton native David Sponseller experienced a little time travel late this summer.

HEAD:'EXTRA!' Reliving paper route memories

DIGITAL SUBHEAD

Gary Brown

Special to The Canton Repository

USA TODAY NETWORK

In a sense, Canton native David Sponseller experienced a little time travel late this summer.

When he retraced his old Repository paper route a few weeks ago, the 91-year-old Canton native, now of Ann Arbor, Michigan, delivered to himself a newspaper sack full of memories.

Memories of folding each paper in his newsboy bag. Recollections of delivering those publications along his northwest Canton route. Flashbacks of collecting each week − "I think it was 23 cents in those days" − from the customers on that route, one that extended along Clarendon Avenue NW, between 8th to 12th streets, as well as side streets. It all came back to him.

"Unlike today, there was no house that did not get the paper," Sponseller said in a recent letter to Rick Armon, the managing editor of The Canton Repository. "My route manager, Paul Seiple, picked up the weekly payment every Tuesday morning from my mother."

The route taught him both business and social skills, Sponseller said. They were lessons that served him well, he said, in his career in metallurgy.

"I owe much to this job," he said in his letter. "I was quite a shy lad, and talking with each of my 75 customers every Friday/Saturday while collecting the weekly payments really helped me gain self-confidence. Also, the need to deliver my papers on time and without fail, 365 days a year, gave me a strong sense of responsibility that I still feel today."

He gained that knowledge and experience at an early age.

"During my senior year at Lincoln High School, I won the Repository's essay contest on the value of being a newsboy," Sponseller recalled, joking that his mention that newspapers were of "paramount importance" to a community might have helped him win the cash award. "The $15 prize would equal $225 to $250 today."

We reached out to Sponseller via telephone to find out what it was like for a man, after more than eight decades, to revisit not only his hometown, but his youth.

Long family background

Sponseller traces his roots to German heritage and the family name of "Spanseiler," before it was changed to its current spelling. That family settled first in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, before moving about 1805 to farmland in Stark County, where Sponseller Grange later was built. In subsequent years, Sponseller's grandfather owned a 96-acre farm on Perry Avenue SW, south of Reedurban.

The family, and there are many branches to the family tree, became influential in their new community. Glen Sponseller, and his son Norman Sponseller, both were Stark County commissioners.

Sponseller's father, Lester, married Martha Bonnot, whose family ran the Bonnot Company. Born early in October of 1931, Sponseller was the third of five children raised in a home on Ninth Street NW, west of Arlington Avenue.

By age 6, while he was attending St. Joseph's grade school, Sponseller already had begun delivering the Catholic weekly Universe Bulletin, which had been passed on in 1938 by his brother. He was 9 and in the fifth grade in 1941, when that brother entrusted Sponseller with his Repository route, three months before the United States entered World War II.

Sponseller kept the route throughout the war, walking it each day for eight years, until graduating from Lincoln High School and heading off to the University of Notre Dame, where he earned his undergraduate degree in metallurgy.

After an ROTC-required stint in the Navy − two years serving on the battleship Missouri and the aircraft carrier Bennington, and another two years teaching engineering at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland − Sponseller moved on to the University of Michigan for his masters and doctorate degrees. Then he taught metallurgy for three years at Notre Dame.

He left education for lab work and conducted and supervised metallurgical research for 22 years at the Climax Molybdenum Lab in Ann Arbor, where he has lived since 1965. Late in the 1980s, the Climax lab closed, so Sponseller began running his own metals lab, where 35 years later he continues to work six days a week.

"Counting the paper routes, I've been working about 84 years now," said Sponseller, who has written 40 technical research papers and has six patents, while performing about 450 "failure analyses" on automotive products for Ford Motor Company in his career. "There's nothing wrong with working. I like what I do."

Sponseller and his wife, Mary, raised seven children. Six sons (all Eagle Scouts) include a surgeon, two architects, and three engineers, while their daughter is an accomplished piano teacher. Upon his wife's death, Sponseller remarried, to Katherine, in 2015.

His second wife accompanied Sponseller on his most recent trip to Canton and shared revisiting his paper route in September, not long before his 91st birthday, just as his first wife had shared a similar walk he had taken when he was 75 in 2007.

Walking the route twice

It was music that prompted Sponseller's return to his hometown, as well as offering the time for his paper route walks.

Sponseller had sung in a boys choir at St. Joseph's school, in Ruth Cogan's a cappella choir at Lincoln High School, then the glee club at Notre Dame, the latter affording him the opportunity to sing twice on Ed Sullivan's televised Easter show. Still an avid singer, Sponseller frequently has returned to perform solos in concerts featuring former Canton singers and visit family.

It was following rehearsals for such concerts in both 2007 and 2022 that Sponseller decided to take time to stride by houses that he knew so well in his youth.

"I remembered the names of at least a third of all my customers," said Sponseller, reciting such surnames as Claypool, Arend, Granger, Waechter, Winkler, Koehler and Larsen. "I delivered every day. You do it that much and it burns into your memory."

Sponseller said he stopped at several of the houses along the route both times he retraced his route. "I couldn't knock on every door, but I knocked on a lot of them." He said he met the most people on his 2007 trip.

"The big difference between the two times is I was surprised the number of people (this year) who didn't answer the door," Sponseller said. "It seems to be, sad to say, that in today's society people live more in fear."

The original owners of the homes along his route are gone, of course. Some ties to the past remained in 2007, but more recently were lost.

"There was one family in 2007 who lived on Eighth Street who seemed to be tickled that I stopped," recalled Sponseller. "They were descendants of the original owners.

"I went back this time and the house was gone."

Many memories returned

The neighborhood in which he delivered newspapers, only a block and a half from the home in which he lived as a boy, "has held up very well," he said.

"The majority of the homes are very well maintained, with nice flowers and other landscaping," he said. "It pleased me to see this because Canton has had such a downturn from the loss of so much industry."

Seeing the homes as they are now, however, spurred memories for Sponseller of the manner in which homes were displayed early in the 1940s, during the years of World War II.

"I remember there were small window flags with blue or gold stars that people flew when their sons were in the war and I would see the flags when I delivered papers," Sponseller said. "There were flags everywhere. What a sacrifice."

Family recollections returned, as well. One day late in summer long ago Sponseller was delivering his newspapers when a friend approached him from an alley. "Hey Dave," the friend shouted. "Your sister Jean just won a pony at the fair!"

"That day I had to go to the fairgrounds to lead the pony down Raff Road across Tuscarawas Street − the Lincoln Highway − to where my granddaddy had a barn behind the house," Sponseller said.

One Clarendon Avenue home was was a special stop, both in 2007 and again this year. It previously was the home of a young boy, Edward Homze, who helped Sponseller deliver papers on the "heaviest" days. The home now is occupied by William and Alice Long.

"In those days, Fridays and Sundays were the heaviest days," Sponseller recalled. "Sundays were big papers with special sections, and Fridays were heavy with ads."

Homze, who went on to be a history professor at the University of Nebraska, died a few years ago, but the memories of him remain vivid in Sponseller's mind.

Sponseller and his wife didn't stop every home on his paper route this most recent visit. He did stop at the former Sohio gas station on the corner of Clarendon and 12th Street, where a Repository truck at that time dropped off the bundles of papers which Sponseller was to deliver.

"The owner (then) was Harold Moore and he was a really nice man," Sponseller recalled. "On cold days he'd let us stand inside to stay warm while we waited."

The greatest gift given to him along his old paper route during his visits back to the neighborhood in which he grew up was the chance to reconnect with such old friends and acquaintances after so many decades.

These individuals were walking alongside him. But he felt their presence. And he welcomed them. They had helped forge a feeling for him that Stark County still is "home."

"I feel blessed to have grown up in a city like Canton."

Reach Gary at gary.brown.rep@gmail.com. On Twitter: @gbrownREP.

This article originally appeared on The Repository: The Monday After: 'Extra!' Reliving paper route memories